The ESB I cooked up last week is still cranking along today. I am a little surprised that there is so much activity this long after brew day, but not concerned yet. Wait, I was sitting here thinking I brewed on Thursday, but it was Saturday. Ooops.

On a nearly unrelated note, I am down to two empty five gallon carboys. Once the ESB is ready to go to secondary, there will be only one left for the Furious clone. It has been a long time since I’ve had that much beer on hand, that many carboys in use.

I am not worried about keg space, though. I still have four of those!

Cheers!
Tony

When I take the carboy brush out after scrubbing the sides from a good ferment I used to get sprayed with all that schmutz on the brush.

Now, I just have a hand towel handy to put over the brush as I pull it out, no more trub/break/hop speckles on my shirts.

Cheers!
Tony

Since I have been helping another guy get into brewing I’ve been inspired to cook up more beer, too. It has been a long time since I had three fermenters full.

I just brewed an ESB yesterday and it is gurgling right along. Last week I did that IPA, and there is still the Maibock in the fridge.  I used to keep written record of my brewings but now I just look back on here to see when I brewed!

There is also a keg of dry mead in the crawl space, but I don’t know if I am going to keep that one. Its over two years old and just doesn’t taste very good. I suppose I’ll deal with it right about the time that the other four kegs are filled and I need an extra. Who knows, maybe in another two years it will taste like liquid gold.

Cheers!
Tony

Drinking a whole growler of IPA is not a good idea.

Even if those four pints were spread over four or five hours, it still is not a good idea. Really, it is ok for the rest of the growler to go flat. If you want to re-carbonate the flat beer just pour it into a water bottle, screw on the “carbonater” and go that route, no waste! It might taste a bit oxidized after that, but hey, what can you do.

Really, there was no need to empty the thing…

Oy.

Cheers,
Tony

This last weekend we went to Cloquet, MN for a baptism. Since it is so close to our old stomping grounds, we had to drive the extra few minutes into Duluth. Once we were in Duluth, we had to make sure to stop by the Brewhouse. If there ever was a place I can claim for truly enhancing my love of good beer, this is it. Even before I was legally able to … um… never mind, lets try that again. Even before I was 21 I would hear about how great these beers were, and that was when it was just starting up!

Where was I? Right, the Brewhouse! I had to run in and get my growler filled with the el Nino IPA. Unfortunately I was in the midst of a cold until today, so I didn’t want to waste such a great flavored beer on a congested head.

What is the source of this disjointed and convoluted post, you might ask?

Half a growler of el Nino IPA.

Cheers!
Tony

My IPA is gurgling right along, though the ferment has slowed since this weekend. I’m planning on digging up my 6 gallon carboy to fire up that ESB mid week. With any luck I’ll have three beers come ready all within a week or two of each other. There is still the Maibock in the fridge right now.

Writing about the fridge, in my order with the Surly Furious clone kit I also bought new tubing for the kegerator. That means in the next few weeks I will start working on converting that fridge into a proper beer serving vessel.

I have come up with what I think is a clever solution to a big problem with upright fridge kegerators. There are plenty of stories about someone opening the freezer door and knocking open the faucet, spilling beer everywhere. I’ll document the progress of my conversion here.

Cheers!
Tony

After writing about the Surly Furious clone at Midwest yesterday and saying how I have to wait for a while before I can really spring for another IPA type beer I realized: Midwest accepts PayPal!

Yes, it is pretty silly for me to order something online from a place that I can drive to, pay shipping then wait two or three days for it to arrive, particularly when my sole job is keeping my kids safe, nurtured and educated. Yes, pretty silly indeed until I think about my PayPal. I have a little chunk o-change there!

Next time I’m in the store I should ask if they’ll accept it in person too!

Yeah, I ordered the kit as well as some tubing so I can get my kegerator functioning properly.

Cheers,
Tony

What the heck have I been doing for all these years without this thing? All those sinks filled with water and ice, buckets of snow, waiting for up to a half hour, sometimes more for the wort to cool. I would get cool times close to fifteen minutes using my method and I thought that was well enough.

I used that wort chiller this evening, turned on the water and gently whirled it while it ran. No lies here folks, it took less than five minutes to chill my 3.5-4 gallons of boiling wort to pitching temperature. One home made chiller ran with Minnesota winter water and WOW.

I humbly retract anything I’ve said before about how unnecessary these little gadgets are, just in time saved it makes it worth it. Who knows what will come of the better cold break and the rest of the science behind it, this thing saves time.

Cheers!
Tony

I started brewing this afternoon after putting the kids down for a nap. Turns out my flat top stove doesn’t crank out enough heat to bring four and a half gallons to a boil. It also turns out that I’m not bright enough to figure that out an hour after adding the malt extracts and waiting for the thing to boil.

I brought it out to the garage and fired up the turkey cooker base and sure enough, not two minutes later I had a rolling boil!

I can’t wait to see how well the wort chiller works!

Cheers!
Tony

I have mentioned on several occasions in the past how much I enjoy Surly Furious. It is a hoptastic explosion of hoppiness in my mouth.

While I was in Midwest yesterday picking up my ESB kit my eye drifted across another clone kit on the shelf. Ferocious IPA. Unfortunately my funds didn’t allow for another IPA kit seeing as I have an imperial IPA still unbrewed and now an ESB to cook up as well.

For those of you reading this who cannot get Furious, try the kit! Depending on how my brew schedule looks I will pick this kit up in a month or so and give it a go. Hopefully it will still be available since it is a limited edition kit.

Cheers,
Tony